Tropical alpine environments (at altitudes above the closed cover woodland and under the restrict of flowers) current an strange set of advanced stresses for plant species. in contrast to temperate alpine environments, the place there are unique seasons of favorable and destructive stipulations for development, tropical alpine habitats current summer time stipulations on a daily basis and wintry weather stipulations each evening.

I was certainly not looking for a relationship at the time, and even more certainly not with someone nine and a half years younger than myself. Chris already had O-level Russian, but I was doing the language from scratch. It was not long before the group realised that Chris was very good at Russian. I marked him out as a possible for helping with ‘homework’ when I became stuck, which I was sure would happen – unlike Chris, I am not a natural linguist. I remember that after the lesson in which Chris first shone, I approached him and congratulated him on his accent and relative fluency – relative to my painful syllable by syllable torturing of this beautiful language.

As an aside, I have often found that alcohol, in moderation of course, helps to loosen a few social inhibitions, although I think in excess it just makes me loudmouthed and uninteresting. ) Now that I can look back, not only with hindsight again, but also over a distance of several years, it seems remarkable that I felt both that I had improving prospects and that I managed to forget about how things seemed to start going especially wrong after I left school. In fact, it’s clear now that I was certainly not typical 35 36 Chris when I was at school, but my contemporaries and the school itself, while there were some very big faults, deserve at least some credit for accepting or at least putting up with an eccentric in their midst.

Academically I felt I had little idea of what I was doing there and in particular what I was supposed to be aiming at in my first year, and how to reach that objective. While I was at school and going through the process of choosing a higher education career, it always seemed to be assumed (not least by me) that Oxford or Cambridge were the right places for me, and I was never encouraged to think differently. I now feel that I should have chosen a course at London University, where the people were welcoming, didn’t rest on their laurels and seemed to have a clearly structured idea of the course content.